Knowledge that Transforms

High rates of turnover among racial minority employees have largely been explained by the adage that dissimilarity breeds discontent. An unexplored, but potentially powerful driver of turnover, may emerge as a result of supervisors' and employees' own beliefs about minority employees' abilities. We rely on predictions from research on Pygmalion effects to examine how external, leader biases can elicit subsequent differences in employees' internal cognitions, which then impact turnover decisions. Utilizing a survey study of 228 employers and employees across four time points, we found support for the notion that leaders view racial minority new hires as having less efficacy than their White counterparts, and that these biases, when combined with less satisfactory supervision, lead minorities to have decreased self‐efficacy, subsequently causing them to perceive a less viable future in that company and voluntarily turn over.

Mentorship quality is an important aspect of mentorship effectiveness, yet we know little about its predictors. Using social identity theory, we examined the relationship between mentor alcohol use norms and mentorship quality as perceived by protégés. Our study also considered the mediating role of protégé identification with the mentor and the moderating role of protégé traditionality. The findings, based on mentor‐protégé dyadic data collected through a three‐wave survey in China, indicate that mentor alcohol use norms are negatively related to mentorship quality, and that this relationship is mediated by protégé identification with the mentor. Furthermore, the traditionality of protégés alleviates not only the negative relationship between mentor alcohol use norms and protégé identification with the mentor, but also the indirect relationship between mentor alcohol use norms and mentorship quality via protégé identification with the mentor. The results underscore the value of focusing on mentor behavioral norms that are not directed toward the protégé. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications for mentoring research.

Actions such as work restructuring and wage and employment freezes taken by organizations in response to recessions are widely assumed to decrease employees' job security and detrimentally affect perceptions of management's trustworthiness. We assess whether these effects occur and if, in turn, they affect workplace absenteeism. Using data from Britain's Workplace Employee Relations Survey 2011, we show that the effects on stress‐based absence are limited and not as predicted, but the effects on withdrawal‐based absence are strong and as predicted. Reductions in well‐being or job security's effect on well‐being did not affect absence, and while the reduction of trust perceptions' effect was to increase anxiety, anxiety did not increase but reduced absenteeism. The effects on withdrawal absence differ: those of recessionary action through job security reduce absenteeism, while those through trust perceptions increase it, both as predicted. The two effects involving trust perceptions are less pronounced when recessionary actions are accompanied by voluntary layoffs, but not by compulsory layoffs. The implications for management are that they should be more conscious of the effects on absence when planning recessionary actions, and more generally their effects on presenteeism.

CEO incentives have been the subject of great interest for human resource scholars. We explore the institutional context within which the CEO makes sense of their incentives. Our theory suggests that CEO equity incentives interact with institutional norms to influence foreign market entry choices. Specifically, we argue that CEOs will weigh the risk bearing created by equity incentives, along with the consequences of legitimacy loss, when deciding whether to deviate from institutional norms when internationalizing. In doing so, we advance human resource literature by demonstrating that CEO responses to incentives are influenced by institutional norms and that CEOs' decisions to deviate from institutional norms are shaped by their incentives. We find support for our framework in the analysis of the stake taken by acquirers in 4,184 cross‐border acquisitions.

This article examines the relationship between the capabilities of HR departments and the level of adoption of corporate HRM practices in MNC subsidiaries. To explain this relationship, we leverage paradox theorizing, still rare but gaining increasing attention in HRM research, and integrate the studies of practice transfer, organizational ambidexterity, and absorptive capacity. First, we establish the conceptual linkages between the implementation and internalization dimensions of practice adoption and the potential and realized absorptive capacities of HR departments. Second, we re‐define the operational and strategic activities of HR departments in terms of the learning paradox of exploitation and exploration. Third, we introduce the concept of HR ambidexterity to describe HR departments that possess high levels of capabilities in both operational (exploitative) and strategic (explorative) task‐domains. Finally, we hypothesize that ambidextrous HR departments are more adept at adopting corporate HRM practices. An analysis of the survey data from 105 foreign subsidiaries of 12 MNCs supports this single hypothesis. The main contribution of this research is in leveraging paradox theorizing to explain the nature of HRM capabilities and their role in the adoption of HRM practices.

There is increasing evidence that multinational enterprises (MNEs) from less dominant economies tend to mimic and disseminate human resource management (HRM) practices sourced from a dominant economy, usually the United States, to overcome their “liabilities of origin.” However, our understanding of the specific challenges involved in the implementation of such practices by firms across different national and subsidiary contexts remains limited. Drawing on evidence from a case study of a South Korean MNE, we examine the extent to which, and ways in which, global HRM policies mimicking U.S. practices are implemented across its sales, manufacturing, and research and development subsidiaries in the United States and India. We find discernible differences in the implementation of the global policies both between the two host country sites and across the three function‐specific subsidiaries in each country, identifying a range of national and subsidiary‐specific factors that inform these variable implementation outcomes. In addition to legitimacy challenges related to the source, appropriateness, and process of transfer, we note a unique form of legitimacy challenge—“the liability of mimicry”—whereby local actors can challenge head office policies on the basis of a claim to superior expertise in the dominant practices, as a particular concern of MNEs from emerging economies.

Following calls for research to increase gender equality, we investigated women's intentions to pursue career opportunities, in the form of career development programs. We built on lack of fit and signaling theory to argue that women's but not men's pursuit of career opportunities would be influenced by recruiter gender and gender‐stereotypical wording in recruitment advertisements. We conducted two studies in Germany. In Study 1 (video‐based experiment with 329 university students), we found that when a male recruiter used stereotypically masculine compared to feminine wording, female students anticipated lower belongingness, expected lower success of an application, and indicated lower application intentions for career opportunities. These differences in female students’ evaluations disappeared when the recruiter was female. While Study 2 (experimental vignette study with 545 employees) replicates the negative effects of masculine wording for female employees; the buffering effect of female recruiters was only replicated for younger, but not for older female employees. Women's anticipated belongingness mediated the relationship between advertisement wording and application intentions when the recruiter was male. Recruiter gender and wording had no effects on men. Our work contributes to a better understanding of when and why contextual characteristics in the recruitment process influence women's pursuit of career opportunities.

Even while attempting to explain the same outcomes, research on leadership and on human resource management (HRM) have largely progressed on parallel trajectories. We extend recent efforts to bring these fields closer together by testing how employee perceptions of a high‐performance work system (HPWS) and transformational leadership (TL), independently and jointly, influence four important employee attitudes. Analyses of 308 subordinates of 76 managers in five multinational companies suggest that a HPWS substitutes for much of the independent influence of TL and constitutes an important boundary condition for some of this influence. Implications for future research on HRM and leadership are discussed.

In this study, we propose that manager job insecurity will moderate the nature of the relationship between perceived overqualification and employee career‐related outcomes (career satisfaction, promotability ratings, and voluntary turnover). We tested our hypotheses using a sample of 124 employees and 54 managers working in a large holding company in Ankara, Turkey, collected across five time periods. The results suggested that average perceived overqualification was more strongly, and negatively, related to career satisfaction of employees when managers reported higher job insecurity. Furthermore, employee perceived overqualification was positively related to voluntary turnover when manager job insecurity was high. No direct or moderated effects were found for promotability ratings. Implications for overqualification and job insecurity literatures were discussed.